Steve:
Sox needed some defense + James et al have gotten better at defensive metrics + there was good value in defense in this year's market = the glove heavy Red Sox 2010 roster.

Mike:
I can live with that.

Mike:
But one othah bit from James made me do a big Hmmmmmm...

Mike:
I mean I can understand a flim-flam hack like Bud Selig making "The Steroid Era is Ovah"pronouncements but I can't understand someone with a brain like Bill James going along with the pahty line.

Steve:
Seriously. The steroid era is so not over.

Mike:
What we've been seeing is the just the friggin prequel.

Steve:
And that's just the chemistry enhancement stuff. Then there's the whole other world of gene tweaking or what Stephen Hawking calls "a New Stage of Evolution."

Comments

I would expect we'd watch robots battle on the baseball fields before we worried about engineering super-human genetic mutants to play the game instead. The only way to influence an entire body's genetic makeup is to do it at such an early stage of development as to capture all of the underlying cellular development in only a few cells' worth of DNA. To fix cystic fibrosis, etc, that is something science can get behind. To hit 5000 HRs in a single season? Well, not unless it's black market. People may say "I want my kid to grow up to be a ball player", but they don't mean "I want to predispose my kid's genetics so that he's a freak of the norm and baseball will be the only thing he'll be capable of doing in the future".

So, while it's fun to imagine all of the cool way-out-there sci-fi possibilities (like we used to think we'd have flying cars by now)...I don't see us acting on our kids in a way that leads this to becoming a reality.

Also, if you're in MA, go vote. I'm tired of seeing less than 50% of all registered voters deciding my future. I'd rather feel like I was in the minority when my candidate loses...and not the minority of the minority. Thanks.

While I always appreciate your "well in reality... " asides, don't forget the spirit of the strip.

Meanwhile re parents...

Just watch a few minutes of the reality show "Little Miss Perfect" and you'll get a glimpse of what parents are capable of. I have no doubt those folks would jump at the chance to manipulate genes, if it such a thing were ever available considering they do plastic surgery on kids, well, toddlers really.

"Well, in reality" this is all just prelude to the future of sport - Death Race.

I watched about 45 seconds of Little Miss Perfect recently and had to turn it off for fear of the bad dreams I was going to have.

For the asterisk issue, I figure when baseball gets to where I can't stand the personalities or behaviour of the players and the competition just seems too pre-determined by cheating resulting from the money/drugs/resources of each player/team, I will quit the bitch. Each of us has their own line in the sand on that. I already came to that line with football and basketball (based on unlikable, angry players in these cases). Of course it might be because my beloved Redskins suck and the Bullets don't exist any longer. maybe.

Love the Jaws ref in the final panel, hb. I'd weigh in on the rest, but political apathy has overtaken me. American politics turns me into the General from AI: "pants on the ground, pants on the ground..."

When the hell does baseball start up again? I fucking hate Jan-Feb, the cruelest month...

If it's not in use out there on some paper, it probably should be. I just feel like Papelbon is really overrated at this point. I don't know if the other teams have enough tape on him to make his tells obvious or what, but he's almost exclusively gone to his fastball and last year was NOT great...even though we're paying him more this year than for last...